Google’s Wild West days are over

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Last weekend, Google quietly began the shuttering of 10 of its lesser-known tools and services. Sidewiki, Fast Flip, Desktop, Google Pack, Image Labeler, Notebook, Subscribed Links, Aardvark — they’ve been around for a few years, they’ve done all right, and now they’re dead. Enterprisey tools like Google Web Security and Google Maps API for Flash will continue to be supported, but the other services will simply… go away.

Google has euphemistically dubbed this a “fall spring clean,” but it’s hard to ignore the fact that this is the largest number of projects that Google has serially murdered. The list also contains a lot of installed desktop software — and, perhaps more tellingly, a lot of social tools. In fact, except for Google Maps API for Flash, everything being retired is a social or desktop app.

This isn’t a coincidence. Larry Page has now been Google’s CEO for six months, and he is merely making good on his promise to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Along with the 10 recently-axed services, close to a dozen more have already met their maker in 2011: Google Labs, Directory, and Health, and almost all of the sites and services inherited from the 2010 Slide acquisition, including, if you can believe it, SuperPoke.

Even more importantly, two of Google’s larger services — Blogger and Picasa — will soon have their brands retired. As we know, Picasa already powers the image side of Google+, and just a few days ago Blogger received a visual refresh that brings it in-line with Google’s new gray-and-charcoal theme. It wouldn’t be surprising if Picasa as a discrete service disappears entirely in the next few weeks, and Blogger will almost certainly become a new tab in Google+ in just a few days.

Combine all of these recent changes with Page’s promise and the success of Google+, and what we have here — for the first time ever — is consolidation. It has been a crazy, stick-your-finger-in-every-pie-and-ask-questions-later couple of years, but Google is finally doubling down on what it does well — search — and what it hopes to excel at: social.

This isn’t to say that Google has stopped gobbling up other companies, of course — 2011 looks set to be Google’s most acquisitive year — but there is now a distinctly targeted approach to the buy-outs. Almost all of 2011’s purchases have been to bolster YouTube, Android, Google+, and advertising. Gone is the scattergun “ooh, that looks like an emerging market! Buy! BUY!” approach, and replaced with more conservative, complementary acquisitions. Even the procurement of Motorola Mobility, as expensive as it was, can be comfortably filed as a consolidation effort and security parachute for Android, Google’s fastest-growing product.

It’s not like Google has simply trashed the services that it’s retiring, either: they’ve just been shaken up, and now they’re settling into their new home as part of Google+ or another core Google service, much in the same way that some of Google Wave’s underlying tech can now be found throughout Google’s websites.

Solid… solid as a rock

Now, as far as the user is concerned, consolidation is a very good thing: it basically means that instead of jumping between lots of bland, semi-useful one-trick pony web services, Google’s properties will now steadily grow in features. Google’s services will become more usable and more desirable, garner more users, and eventually make more money. As far as developers are concerned, however, consolidation isn’t quite so good: just take a look at Twitter’s steady squeezing-out of third-party services — or if you want something a little closer to home, just take a look at how Google has played the closed-open game with Chrome and Android.

In other words, the young, slapdash Wild West days of Google are over. From this point on — at least while Larry Page is the CEO — Google will diverge very little from its current course. The products that have made it this far without being cut — search, advertising, YouTube, Android, Chrome — and continue to receive a lot of marketing and PR dollars are safe. The rest, however, are now on a knife edge. The Chrome OS project has been ominously quiet, as has Google TV — and both services could quite easily be replaced by Android and the Chrome browser. Some of Google’s nascent, peripheral services have obvious convergence-and-consolidation paths with primary offerings — Voice, Maps, Offers, and the new Games division are perfectly suited to Google+, for example — but it wouldn’t be surprising if a few more outliers are shuttered before the end of 2011.

The Motorola purchase is certainly an anomaly — branching out into hardware is about as big a divergence as it gets — but if you look at Motorola as merely a patent piñata to better protect Android, it makes more sense.

Cosying up to Big G

The end result of all this, of course — if you continue to use Google services, anyway — is that more and more of your personal data will be consolidated under the Google umbrella. Picasa on its own provides almost no monetizable features to Google — but tied in with full name, location, and various context data from Google+, it will be an absolute gold mine. The same could be said with Google Voice and Maps and Games.

Ultimately, that is Google’s entire reason for consolidating under Google+. As it stands, a lot of your online activities are anonymous, and thus very low value to an advertising broker like Google. If Google can link your full name to your activities on each and every one of its web properties, and across the web with its advertising networks, however, then Google stands to make an awfully large amount of money. We’ve discussed it before, but it’s worth reiterating: do you really want to put all of your eggs in the Google basket?

Post a Comment

If you actually read past the first couple of paragraphs, you’ll (hopefully) discover that it’s actually nothing of the sort. It’s a cautionary tale!

Joey Spinosa

Hey Mr. Anthony,

I’ve been reading that ending SuperPoke has people really tiffed! I’m not a big Google user, so I’m really not up to speed. Apparently, Google had an online application where you obtain a virtual “pet”, like a cat or a dog, I suppose, and you care for it… The real hook, being, of course, that you are in contact with all the other “pet” owners and it becomes a social network at heart. Sounds fine, and harmless enough…

From what I’ve read though, lots of handicapped and otherwise convolescent individuals are really tied up in this thing, and frankly, they feel like Google has killed their best friend.

I’m not lying! Google might want to re-think some of this. Sounds like some of these folks can make quite a stir, and what a PR nightmare for Google… “Yeah, let’s go stick-it to the handicapped and little old ladies in Pasadena!”

Yikes.

I’m sure Google will do just fine either way. Being likened to a rampant elephant has some advantages, you’re big, most folks will either hop on for a ride or get out of your way… But then there’s always some joker with a big rampant-elephant gun… Hope for Google’s sake SuperPoke isn’t the bullet in that gun.

Cheers!

Joey Spinosa

Hey Mr. Anthony,

I’ve been reading that ending SuperPoke has people really tiffed! I’m not a big Google user, so I’m really not up to speed. Apparently, Google had an online application where you obtain a virtual “pet”, like a cat or a dog, I suppose, and you care for it… The real hook, being, of course, that you are in contact with all the other “pet” owners and it becomes a social network at heart. Sounds fine, and harmless enough…

From what I’ve read though, lots of handicapped and otherwise convolescent individuals are really tied up in this thing, and frankly, they feel like Google has killed their best friend.

I’m not lying! Google might want to re-think some of this. Sounds like some of these folks can make quite a stir, and what a PR nightmare for Google… “Yeah, let’s go stick-it to the handicapped and little old ladies in Pasadena!”

Yikes.

I’m sure Google will do just fine either way. Being likened to a rampant elephant has some advantages, you’re big, most folks will either hop on for a ride or get out of your way… But then there’s always some joker with a big rampant-elephant gun… Hope for Google’s sake SuperPoke isn’t the bullet in that gun.

Cheers!

Joey Spinosa

Hey Mr. Anthony,

I’ve been reading that ending SuperPoke has people really tiffed! I’m not a big Google user, so I’m really not up to speed. Apparently, Google had an online application where you obtain a virtual “pet”, like a cat or a dog, I suppose, and you care for it… The real hook, being, of course, that you are in contact with all the other “pet” owners and it becomes a social network at heart. Sounds fine, and harmless enough…

From what I’ve read though, lots of handicapped and otherwise convolescent individuals are really tied up in this thing, and frankly, they feel like Google has killed their best friend.

I’m not lying! Google might want to re-think some of this. Sounds like some of these folks can make quite a stir, and what a PR nightmare for Google… “Yeah, let’s go stick-it to the handicapped and little old ladies in Pasadena!”

Yikes.

I’m sure Google will do just fine either way. Being likened to a rampant elephant has some advantages, you’re big, most folks will either hop on for a ride or get out of your way… But then there’s always some joker with a big rampant-elephant gun… Hope for Google’s sake SuperPoke isn’t the bullet in that gun.

Cheers!

Joey Spinosa

Hey Mr. Anthony,

I’ve been reading that ending SuperPoke has people really tiffed! I’m not a big Google user, so I’m really not up to speed. Apparently, Google had an online application where you obtain a virtual “pet”, like a cat or a dog, I suppose, and you care for it… The real hook, being, of course, that you are in contact with all the other “pet” owners and it becomes a social network at heart. Sounds fine, and harmless enough…

From what I’ve read though, lots of handicapped and otherwise convolescent individuals are really tied up in this thing, and frankly, they feel like Google has killed their best friend.

I’m not lying! Google might want to re-think some of this. Sounds like some of these folks can make quite a stir, and what a PR nightmare for Google… “Yeah, let’s go stick-it to the handicapped and little old ladies in Pasadena!”

Yikes.

I’m sure Google will do just fine either way. Being likened to a rampant elephant has some advantages, you’re big, most folks will either hop on for a ride or get out of your way… But then there’s always some joker with a big rampant-elephant gun… Hope for Google’s sake SuperPoke isn’t the bullet in that gun.

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